AMA: Google Developer Marketing Lead, Google Assistant, Vishal Naik on Platform Product Marketing

I'm big on analogies (perhaps annoyingly so), so equate it to a concert: The Portfolio or Suite is like the band. It's the grouping of the products that you sell/come to see. The Ecosystem is like TicketMaster or StubHub. It's how you gain access to see the band/use the product if you're not walking up to the theater box office to buy a ticket. The Platform is like the stage, where the band is performing, it's connected into the sound system and lighting, and because of it, all attendees are enabled to see and enjoy. In a business setting, I do often hear the term Platform used synonymously with Suite, which technically isn't wrong--because your Suite can be the thing that allows a customer to do more things. Though that somewhat implies that you're the only one in that space. Whether or not you have direct competitors, there is always going to be some other vendor out there trying to get the same budget from your customer, so I tend to try to not use the terms "platform" and "suite" interchangeably. As customer's are getting more and more technical, I see the term Platform being used to explain something different than the Suite. The Suite is the grouping, the Platform is the connective tissue that makes it all work together, and then there is the Ecosystem which is the path you can take to tap into that Suite.

When selling a platform, you're selling what a customer can accomplish, less what a customer is buying. Obviously in the SaaS world, a lot of our marketing is based on the product being the thing that gets a customer to a desired future state, but that's even more true when selling a platform. The big change is the customer's journey to get to that desired future state. Their path to usage is different, their stage in the purchase path is different, and the stakeholders needed in the room are different. So I would suggest you stick with the same thematic narrative of enabling your sellers to showcase offerings from your company that solve customer needs, but be sure to also enable those sellers on the nuances of the platform sale--what does the usage journey look like? How can an SDR get an appointment for the AE? How can an AE get the customer over to an SE? How do you make the platform consumable to a seller, but not overlapping with your "standard" products? How does your sales team's core persona engage the necessary persona for a platform conversation? Oftentimes at the companies where I have worked, Sales can gravitate to the path of least resistance, so you'll need to make it easy for them to 1) understand platform nuances and 2) have a path to keep the sales conversation going when one of those nuances comes up. Platform customers tend to be stickier than others because of all the work they have to do on their own to leverage the offering, so if you can get a sales team to not feel like they are stumped in the conversation and that they can convert leads at parity with other products, then there is more money in a platform sale. So the opportunity is there, you just need to find what your sales team needs so that they are confident in their talk track and have the path detailed towards next steps. 

In my opinion, the most important thing in prioritizing your messaging is finding the common denominator across your platform. Does it create a new output, or solve a new problem, or enable a new style of working, for example. Then you prioritize that in your messaging hierarchy, and use the various things that your platform does as means to support that new narrative. For example, DocuSign's platform is composed of our ecosystem, our developer tools, our foundational infrastructure and our security and compliance. It allows a customer to control their own roadmap for agreements, because customers can trust that DocuSign is going to work for their needs (availability and security) and that it can support new use cases regardless of the specific path to usage (integrations or custom development). So the platform does a lot, but the goal is to talk about what commonality comes out of all of those items working in tandem. That's the thing to focus messaging on, which will come to you if you focus on market context, the customer's pain points, and your differentiated point of view. From there, let what your platform does be the secondary part of your messaging.

Answering this based on the context of the question being asked from the POV of a CRM vendor looking to scale: The biggest challenge I've come across is attribution. The framework to drive consistent lead generation really focuses on the mediums, but any marketer is going to test and optimize based on what drives return in their specific org. Those decisions are going to stem from what's working and what isn't. So that portion will fall into place relatively seamlessly. The piece that's a bit harder to solve is confidence in what that data is saying, which is because we're often handed first touch or last touch attribution metrics, which don't really take into account today's buyer journey. So if a CRM could better solve for the overall customer journey and analyze the various touchpoints that a customer takes with a vendor and then weight those touchpoints against how those customers progressed in the funnel, then the data that a marketer would have at their disposal is far more trustworthy. That advanced data set would dictate the tech stack that would be needed. Because absent that, all you can really say is that you need your email, website, and SDR/AE outreach in sync--but there isn't really anything differentiated about that stack.

Great question. To be frank, even for companies with a reputation of being open and extensible, this one is always a challenge when you're in a Platform role. Because at the end of the day, the Platform is less about what products your company creates and more about what a customer can do. Thus you're always in conversations with stakeholders who have a POV that the products your company creates are the things that enable customer success. So there's the nuance where you need to decouple product creation from customer output. I wouldn't say that DocuSign has fully solved this need, but where we've made progress is in showcasing the business impact driven out of the platform, based on the same KPIs that the rest of the company looks at, specifically what senior leadership is looking at. An example is we ran some messaging research on our platform and APIs, and one output was some interesting data on decision maker consideration and preference. A persona that we don't typically market platform products to. This opened some doors with our Global Demand team. Opening those doors led to some added internal marketing channels that we could leverage. Those new channels led to larger campaign results. Which led to us revisiting how we look at our historical data so that we. could show impact to the org. So it was really one step at a time, each time the next step being bigger and broader than the last. The final output of multiple steps together is starting to see change. While a team effort, the end result is now we can tell the Platform story based on conversion rate of a developer lead vs the conversion rate of other inbound lead gen sources. We can compare ACV of a developer lead vs other inbound sources. We can compare LTV/churn of a platform customer vs all customers. We can show lift in usage from customers after Platform marketing content is consumed. So the goal is really around how we can understand the decision making criteria that our company leadership is considering when building our top-line strategy and then aligning our platform story around those same KPIs. The mistakes we've made have been where we think we have a silver bullet. A new stat, a new data point, etc. that will drive change. There is none, it has to be a continual and iterative story where one item builds on the last. I'd also add that a mistake made is assuming that the powers that be are going to be OK with the answer that "the platform business is different and thus needs to be viewed differently" because change at the company wide level is only going to happen if the company believes, from the top down, that being a "platform company" will equate to more business opportunities than being a "product company".

I view the role of a PMM as being someone who owns the full story/customer perception of a product, is the product-line CMO so to speak. Sometimes you will need to market a solution, sometimes you will need to launch a product, sometimes you will need to convince sales people to do something and sometimes you will need to create a new narrative. So as I think about product marketing for my team and what a PMM would do, it's less around a product or a solution and more around being nimble to build and adjust the strategy based on what market needs you can solve in the given time frame. I would say that it's fair to consider the work that a "solution marketer" does to be an offshoot of what a "product marketer" would do, and would argue that they should be all under your PMM/GTM leader. Two sides of the same coin, IMO. 

An Engineering leader at a previous company described this to me as a tripod--decisions made based on the intersection of PM, Eng and PMM. Here PMM is representing the customer, and to an effect, also Sales opportunities. In an ideal state, you'd have this. When you don't, you'll need to understand what is driving the decisions behind what makes it into the roadmap. Is it revenue? Is it usage? Is it a PM's pride in shipping what they ideated? If its the latter, then you may not be in a position to be happy at that company. If its one of the former, you'll want to uncover what that driving factor is and then formulate your strategy around what you need to showcase in order to surface consumer insights into the roadmap. How are the insights that you uncover making it easier for Product to solve their needs (indirect, upleveled value) and then let that funnel down into the actual roadmap decisions (direct value). 

Market research is a pretty valuable data point in terms of prioritizing verticals (or any other segmentation slice), but so too is your product ownership point of view and your internal usage data. So you don't need to lean on external research, but it can certainly augment your other efforts. I think there's value in looking at 1p, 2p and 3p input sources in coordination with each other. Where we have used external research towards our segmentation processes is when we do message testing measured across different user groups and then review any consideration or preference gains we see across those persona types such that we can forecast where we may see impact and how we should talk to that specific group. In this style test, we're building a messaging hypothesis and then using it as a constant and the persona type as the variable, so that we could see impact to the segment. Depending on how you set up your study, you can also introduce nuances in your messaging to work through as well. You can also look at interest across verticals and map that back to your product differentiation to target industries where you have the best PMF.

The biggest thing I consider is that the messaging created is about the customer and what they are thinking/feeling/experiencing. Rather than what we are building and what we are selling. I've kept a messaging template from a previous org where we focused on market context, customer pain points, a customer's unmet needs, and how all of those funnel into your org's differentiated point of view. Your product supports all of this, and your product tells a story of how your organization (nuance: not just the product you are crafting messaging for) solves this customer need. So if you're telling a security story, a mobile story, a context switching story, etc.--you're keeping that macro point at hand and introducing your new feature or product as part of that story. (obviously safe for the new launch to be a big part of the story, but not the overall story) So the new SDK we just launched that is easy for a developer to get started with isnt the complete simplified developer onboarding strategy, its a pillar of it. And we tell the launch story of this new SDK around how we continue to simplify how developers get started, and the new SDK is the hero of the story, but other features are also included and recapped. So its a combo of completeness of the story and newsworthiness of the launch. And from there, to ensure it checks the appropriate boxes and solves the greater need the team has, ensuring that the appropriate number of cross functional stakeholders are included in the approval matrix. 

At DocuSign, there are product marketers across our main product categories, as well as industry and audience teams. Every company I've ever worked at has grouped their teams differently, so I tend to consider new roles based on mapping skills to company needs. If the largest TAM is in a vertical that is specialized, perhaps you'll need an industry PMM. If the biggest gap in company need is relative to product launch materials, maybe you need someone focused on building a great bill of materials. Etc.